In the last report we described our Wave 1 and were actually prepared to introdcuce Wave 2 as the last great phase.

However, in July our schedule changed slightly, when SAP addressed us with the idea to immediately go for SAP ERP with EHP7. Of course, for us as an SAP full-service provider it is very interesting to always apply the latest technology. So we decided to go for it, even if this meant to repeat phase 0 again – this time with the much talked about EHP 7. It will most like make us the first company productively applying SAP ERP EHP 7 powered by SAP HANA.

Since at this time EHP 7 was not officially published yet, SAP has included us in the Customer Validation Program. This program is the last check for SAP AG before a release or new product is finally released for the market then. At the same time, customers benefit from a very close support by SAP.

The repetition of phase 0 took place under the same procedures as before (please refer to phase 0) and to our full satisfaction. Prognoses of SAP that there should not be any additional technical challenges have proven true. The release change and migration behaved the same way as with EHP 6 before. Therefore, we have finally decided in favor of introducing EHP7 (technically 6.17 on Hana).

As far as the time factor is concerned, the repetition of phase 0 took us approximately three weeks. Originally, we had planned to use this time to evaluate the so-called “DMO tools”. As we already mentioned in a previous blog post, using the DMO tool enables release upgrade and migration in a single step and therefore promises a speed advantage over the “classic” procedure of carrying out the release upgrade at first and after that the HANA migration. Since we have learned from Wave 0 that the runtime of upgrade and migration are not critical in our system environment, we have finally opted to evaluate EHP 7 in this phase instead of the DMO tool. Of course, for our customers, particularly in the manufacturing industry and in trade, the runtime of upgrade and hence the duration of the system downtime involved represents a very critical factor. For this reason we will carry out a further repetition of Wave 0 with EHP 7 and DMO in parallel with our Wave 2 (upgrade and migration of our development, test and productive system) now. This is planned using identical hardware and an identical source system, in order to be able to directly compare the runtime behavior with and without DMO. In a later blog post, I will report on our experience. There will be further news on the HANA project in a few weeks when we will be able to report on our first Wave 2 experience.